GENERAL SUBMISSIONS GUIDELINES

PLEASE NOTE: VERITY LA IS TAKING A BREAK FROM ITS REGULAR PUBLISHING SCHEDULE AND IS NOT CURRENTLY ACCEPTING SUBMISSIONS. WE’LL BE REASSESSING THE JOURNAL’S STATUS IN EARLY 2023. PLEASE SUBSCRIBE TO OUR MAILING LIST TO RECEIVE UPDATES ABOUT OUR FUTURE ACTIVITIES. 

We welcome submissions from all writers, emerging or established. We’re interested in new voices, different voices, minority voices, progressive voices; we like writing that gets you in the head as well as the gut, that has a point, that isn’t afraid.

Whether it’s fiction, poetry, essay or review, we want high-quality text, and by ‘high-quality’ we mean thoughtfully composed words with a focus on impact.

Think you’ve got what we want? Read on for more about how to submit, and what you can do that might just make us fall head-over-heels with your work.

We publish in the following streams

• Arrests of Attention: visual art
• Being Sure: creative non-fiction
• Bilirr (Black Cockatoo): Emerging First Nations Australia Writers Project
• Clozapine Clinic — The Frater Project: writing which engages with experiences of individual and societal madness
• Discoursing Diaspora: a platform for work addressing issues of displacement and social justice
• /dɪsˈrʌpt/: a platform for D/deaf and disabled artists
• Heightened Talk: high-octane poetry
• Lies To Live By: short fiction
• Lighthouse Yarns: interviews with writers, artists and thinkers
• Out of Limbo: ‘coming out’ and ‘secret stories’ from the gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer, non-binary, intersex and asexual communities 
• Rogue State: bold nonfiction
• Poetry in Motion: performative text, video poetry and spoken word
• TWT: Travel/Write/Translation: travel writing with a twist
• Through the Looking Glass: reviews of literature and other creative practices

How to get published in Verity La

Official Stuff

• We only accept previously unpublished work
• There is a maximum of three submissions per person during each reading period 
• We DON’T accept simultaneous submissions
• We don’t have official word-limits — hooray for us and you! But we find up to around 5000 words suits us best
• Verity La holds First Electronic Rights to all works accepted. Authors agree not to publish or authorise the electronic publication of the material for three months following first publication. For subsequent reprints, we ask for acknowledgement of first publication in Verity La 
• If your work is accepted for publication in the journal it will also be considered for inclusion in our bi-annual Verity La eBook anthology (next edition, 2020)
• It may take up to three months for us to read your work and reply to your submission. If we don’t get back to you within that time, feel free to query. Heaven knows we’re only human and sometimes things slip through the cracks!
• If we accept your work, it may take up to six months for us to actually publish it. We apologise for this, but so much good work comes our way that we sometimes simply can’t let it go. Plus, our format of publishing just one person’s work, twice a week, means that although wait times can be long, when your work is published, it receives all of our — and our readers’ — attention. It’s worth the wait!
• One final thing: if your work does end up appearing in Verity La, please don’t engage with us about our graphic design/layout/illustration decisions — they’re a matter for us and we take our editorial independence seriously. You just bask in the glory of getting published!
• Okay, here’s the real, actual, honest-to-god final thing: please follow these requirements — it make us much nicer people, which means we’re in a better frame of mind to read your work

Other Stuff

• Submit your best work, work that even you as the writer — or artist — is excited about
• Writing for the online environment means that you’re competing against an infinite amount of other stylish and interesting sites — aim to engage your readers within seconds. How to do this? Do it dramatically and succinctly
• Edit your work, and edit it again, and edit it one more time; make sure that you search and destroy every typo, including punctuation errors — a misplaced apostrophe is like grit in the eye
• We don’t have a specific style guide, but we’d appreciate it if you’d present your work if chosen for publication using: single spaces after full stops; single quotation marks (double within a quote); end-notes using Roman numerals and subsequent internal citation of page numbers in parenthesis once a text has been referenced (in reviews/essays); judicious use of hyperlinks (if the source is reputable and stable)
• Include a simple covering email briefly stating your writing background so we know where you’re coming from
• And of course, subscribe to the journal (it’s free, and you’ll get a sample of our latest eBook anthology!) so you know what sort of work we’re into

Send us your wonderful wonderful work via

• Submittable (you’ll need to sign-in, but it’ll only take a sec)

• Enquires to editor@verityla.com